When Cookbooks and Comics Converge

It wasn’t so long ago that expressing a passionate interest in either comic books or food would have you branded something of a nerd. But somewhere along the way, between the rise of the Apatowian man-child and the crowning of the first Top Chef, the nerds were vindicated—and these days, they’re teaming up in ways we never imagined.

You don’t have to look hard to notice the mingling of comics and food culture. We’ve seen chefs like Eli Kirshtein team up with Spider-Man and Chris Cosentino sharpen his knives alongside Wolverine’s claws in Marvel cameos, and last year DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint published Anthony Bourdain’s graphic novel Get Jiro!, about a knife-wielding young sushi chef engaged in all-out culinary war.

But perhaps more surprising has been the use of comics to share recipes and tell the types of stories that before would have ended up in traditional cookbooks. Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (First Second, 2013), which was released earlier this month, is the latest to adopt this format. (Knisley is also one of several artists who’ve contributed to Saveur‘s “Recipe Comix” series.) And before that, Dirt Candy chef Amanda Cohen turned to words-with-pictures when it came time to publish Dirt Candy: A Cookbook(Clarkson Potter, 2012), featuring recipes and behind-the-scenes tales from her gamechanging vegetarian restaurant in NYC.

In order to better understand why comics and food make so much sense together, we caught up with Knisley and Cohen to find out what made them want to tell their food stories in a medium that’s more famous for depicting dudes with bionic arms than chefs armed with whisks. Here are four key reasons why comics and cooking make a winning pair.

It wasn't so long ago that expressing a passionate interest in either comic books or food would have you branded something of a nerd. But somewhere along the way, between the rise of the Apatowian man-child and the crowning of the first Top Chef, the nerds were vindicated—and these days, they're teaming up in ways we never imagined.
You don't have to look hard to notice the mingling of comics and food culture. We've seen chefs like Eli Kirshtein team up with Spider-Man and Chris Cosentino sharpen his knives alongside Wolverine's claws in Marvel cameos, and last year DC Comics' Vertigo imprint published Anthony Bourdain’s graphic novel Get Jiro!, about a knife-wielding young sushi chef engaged in all-out culinary war.
But perhaps more surprising has been the use of comics to share recipes and tell the types of stories that before would have ended up in traditional cookbooks. Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (First Second, 2013), which was released earlier this month, is the latest to adopt this format. (Knisley is also one of several artists who've contributed to Saveur's "Recipe Comix" series.) And before that, Dirt Candy chef Amanda Cohen turned to words-with-pictures when it came time to publish Dirt Candy: A Cookbook(Clarkson Potter, 2012), featuring recipes and behind-the-scenes tales from her gamechanging vegetarian restaurant in NYC.
In order to better understand why comics and food make so much sense together, we caught up with Knisley and Cohen to find out what made them want to tell their food stories in a medium that’s more famous for depicting dudes with bionic arms than chefs armed with whisks. Here are four key reasons why comics and cooking make a winning pair.

Comics are an ideal medium for recipe instructions.

One of the most common complaints about cookbooks is that the recipes sound delicious, but the instructions are too difficult to follow. Comics are a great way to solve that problem. As with a video, you get a visual guide to explain exactly how to perform each step, but you also get to work through that information at your own pace.
“We knew the recipes in the book were going to be complicated, but we wanted to put the restaurant recipes into book form,” Cohen explains. “It just seemed so natural to turn the recipes into comics—like, ‘Why doesn't everybody do it this way?’ You can put so much information in one panel, and you can see it so your mind can really embrace it. It's so different from reading a more traditional cookbook where it's just listing steps. Sometimes when you're reading a recipe, it can be hard to follow it. But when you can visually see it, it's like ‘Oh, yeah, this isn't that complicated! Vegetable pan over high heat. Got it.’”

A chef's personality is more important than ever, and comics help it shine through.

A reality show might give people a glammed-up view of what a chef is like in the kitchen, but the intimacy of the comic strip offers an opportunity for an author to really relate to an audience in a more personal way. For Cohen, that was a big part of the appeal of doing comics. Not every great chef is going to be a master of telling his or her own story as a writer. But when you get to know that chef through a friendly-looking cartoon character, like the one that serves as Cohen's proxy in Dirt Candy, it's a lot easier to let that personality shine through without self-consciousness or stilted formality.
“The last thing we wanted people to think about the book, or the restaurant, or me, is that we're not approachable,” she says. “There's a personality in this restaurant, and in this book, that makes it so much more enjoyable than these more anonymous cookbooks or restaurants, where you don't know the people behind it. It almost makes the recipes make more sense. ‘Oh, I know what I'm supposed to be tasting in this dish! That's what the panda, monkey, and girl on the page were trying to tell me!’”

We relate to food intimately, and comics are a uniquely intimate medium.

Food is personal, and the comic-book format offers new ways to draw readers into the narrative, and to blend recipes and storytelling more seamlessly than you can in a more traditional format. For Knisley, this approach felt like the natural fit for her mashup of memoir and recipe book: Using the same drawings and color schemes whether she's telling a story about her life or sharing her chocolate chip cookie recipe blurs the lines between where memoir ends and instruction begins—and that's the point.
Of course, part of the reason food culture is so popular right now is that we have more effective ways to share pictures of attractive-looking meals than ever before. But for Knisley, comics offer ways to go beyond the coffee table-style food porn (or the Instagrammed wannabes) that is currently en vogue.
“I wanted the reader's appetite to be whetted by the story, and the food,” says Knisley. “I wanted to inspire people to want to cook the food that I then give the recipe for, through integrating it into the story, and talking about how it tasted and what it means to me in the course of my life.”

As both interests become more mainstream, there are more opportunities than ever for illustrators and cooks to collaborate.

Fifteen years ago, any mainstream story about comics would probably start with the headline, “Bam! Pow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!” Meanwhile, anyone who declared himself a “foodie" was likely hanging out at a fringe farmers market, not a Whole Foods. Now, though, both food and comics have grown in the public’s consciousness, so the chances for osmosis between the two are far greater.
“There are a lot of cartoonists who are coming out of the closet as big foodies,” Knisely says.
Cohen agrees. “Food is this huge movement right now, and everyone is looking for different ways to engage people with it,” she says. “More people would call themselves foodies than they ever have before, and more people are interested in comic books. There's no way that these two worlds can't intersect. They have to meet at some point. Who wouldn't want to be a comic book character? That's pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.”